13. Ava
13
Ava
Nico’s idea of therapy is a two-hour drive upstate.
I’m not allowed to wallow in last night, given no time to overanalyze and strip it down. Nico forces me into the passenger seat of today , and he fills up the time telling me about how the city used to be before TikTok and boba shops. I poke fun at him for recounting his glory days like a boomer telling war stories. Nico’s not dissuaded, and even if I poke fun at him, I really am curious about who Nico was before prison. I knew him, but not in any way that really mattered. I knew him the way I knew fairytales and ghost stories, more myth than man even when we shared the same roof.
He tells me how he got involved in the fighting ring. Sal was the one who used to run it, and Nico only showed up for the fights, always against his dad’s wishes. Apparently, cage fighting isn’t a sport befitting someone who would eventually be the head of the family. If Nico lost a fight, people might lose respect for him.
But Nico fought anyway. He learned not to lose, how to win at any cost, no matter the odds.
He couldn’t win them all, but he always redeemed himself. It didn’t matter how many fights it took or how many nights he had to drag himself home broken and bloody. Nico lived by one rule:
He never stopped until he came out on top, and eventually, everyone knew it.
I’m starting to get a sense of where his tenacity comes from, his obsessive, relentless push for the things he wants, when the car swerves onto the exit ramp and leaves the interstate behind.
The city is long gone out here. We’re surrounded by flat land and lines of trees gathered up on either side of the road. I was born and raised in the gridlock, and this feels about as close to the middle of nowhere as I’ve ever bothered going. I’m tempted to start hitting him with the are we there yet? whining when we pull off of the main road and onto a long stretch of winding gravel.
The road meanders through a thick tree line, where it clears out into flat farmland with fences lining each side of the road. Someone hammered no trespassing signs into the trees, weather-stripped omens warning us to turn back every few feet. Nico doesn’t turn back.
We park in the driveway of a sprawling ranch-style home. Dogs bark from inside the house, bounding around the screen door.
A man with thin hair and a sun-spotted face comes out onto the front porch with a shotgun in his hands.
“Nico,” I breathe, a low warning, but he tells me to stay put and gets out of the car. The mood changes once the man’s eyes land on Nico, his face animating. Instead of being held at double-barrel gunpoint, the two shake hands like old friends. I can’t make out the muffled words, but their catching up is brief and familiar. They laugh, and the tension is easily forgotten.
Nico jerks a thumb over his shoulder to gesture somewhere off in the fields behind us.
I take another glance at the farm, wondering if we just drove two hours so Nico can try to teach me some life lessons by shoveling horse shit.
The car door opens and Nico gets back in, starting up the engine.
“Who the hell was that?” I ask.
“Family friend,” Nico says as we continue deeper into the property. “Think of him like a business associate.”
I glance around, looking for any sign of the family’s business out here in these fields.
“Don’t tell me the family’s secret side hustle is pickled beetroots.”
Nico just grins.
The gravel under our tires turns to dirt. Nico parks us alongside the edge of a field, takes the handgun out of his glovebox, and tells me to get out of the car. My eyes roam from the pistol in his hands to our surroundings. Empty, flat land stretches out from us to the distant trees, with not another soul in sight.
“I know you’re upset I left you on read, but does that really warrant turning me into a cold case?” I ask, annoyed rather than afraid.
“If I was going to get rid of you, Ava, we’d have taken a different turn back there at the crossroad,” Nico says.
“How reassuring.”
I slam the door behind me. Nico pops open the hood of the car, where he has two boxes stored in the compartment—one, a narrow metal case, the other the cooler he took with us from the house.
“You said you wanted to do something that you shouldn’t. Putting a gun in the hand of somebody who should probably be committed to a psych ward sounds like a pretty bad idea to me.”
He passes me the gun. Just by the way I hold it, he can tell I’m not familiar with them.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“You’re supposed to learn how to use it.”
We walk deep into the yellowing field, where a makeshift range has been set up with logs and bullet-peppered target sheets. Shattered glass crunches like seashells on the beach as we walk along, the shards sun-bleached and interwoven in the grass. I wonder how long Nico has come out here, if some of these bottles are from when he was my age or even younger, learning his way around a gun.
“Aren’t there gun ranges in the city?”
“There are,” he says. “There’s also a few laws there saying that me holding a gun constitutes multiple felony charges.”
“Pretty sure those laws say the same thing out here.”
“Arrest me, then.”
He pops open the cooler and takes a beer out of the ice, twisting the top off with his teeth and spitting it aside.
“Aren’t you supposed to bring empty bottles to shoot?” I ask.
“They’re gonna be empty,” he counters, tossing one to me.
I don’t like beer because of the taste. I don’t like this beer because I can’t twist off the cap to save my life, and Nico has to take it back from me and pop the top off with the smallest motion of his hand, staring me dead in the eyes the entire time.
“Don’t say a word,” I mutter, swiping it back and taking one disgusting mouthful. I swallow it just to spite him. We sit against the wooden fence, the sun bright and birds calling in the distance.
“This is what you do when you need to relax?” I ask him. “Shoot bottles?”
“Shoot something,” Nico agrees lowly.
I shake my head at that answer. I never heard much about the man Nico shot, and for all the stories he told me on the drive down, that one he never mentioned. I take another sip, wondering if I should bother asking about a dead man. If the how and why matters.
Nico tears through three beers in the time it takes me to get through half of mine, and I eventually give up on the taste and hand mine to him. He finishes it off for me with a couple bobs of his Adam’s apple, swiping his hand against his mouth.
I think I might like beer better if I tasted it on his mouth.
I hate myself for that intrusive thought.
He sets the bottles up on the logs set up for this purpose.
“You ever done this?” he asks.
“Not like this,” I admit. “They let me execute the man who killed Vinny.”
But there was no skill in that. Quick, point blank. The squeeze of one finger. If I think about it, I can still feel the cold pressure of the trigger against my index finger. The before and after of a man screaming, then falling forever silent. Snuffed out just like that.
He took everything from me, and I took everything from him.
It didn’t change anything, but I guess it does make me feel better in a way, knowing that he’s not still out there. He doesn’t get to carry on, living the life Vinny didn’t get to. I don’t think about it very much if I can help it.
“Alright, your turn,” Nico says suddenly. “Would you do it again? Same way?”
“You already know the answer to that,” I say, picking up the handgun again.
Guns used to make me so nervous. I would have handled one about as well as I’d have handled a live snake, as if it could lash out and hurt me. Nico takes my hands in his and walks me through the repetition of the weapon—loading and unloading, clearing the chamber, setting the safety, keeping my finger straight while at rest.
His hands are calloused and warm as he takes his time, tucking me up against his chest as he mutters his low instructions in my ear. He puts the dangerous thing in my hands like a toy, and it stirs that same feeling as when he had a knife at my throat. Dangerous and tempting.
“Aren’t you worried,” I ask, squinting one eye and practicing looking down the barrel, “about teaching a girl to shoot any troublesome men that come around, refusing to leave her alone?”
Nico just grins and buries his smile against my neck. I think he might kiss me, and I tense all over, bracing for it as if Nico is the one with the gun. Instead, he adjusts my arms to correct my stance.
“Is this right?” I ask.
“From here, you don’t know until you shoot.”
My palms feel slick against the grip. I take a deep breath.
“No stakes,” he reminds me softly, dragging his thumb over the sun-dappled skin on my shoulder, where the freckles are starting to peek through. He leans down and traces a path between them with his tongue, ending with a kiss in the crook of my neck. “Take your time,” he mutters.
“This isn’t fair,” I mutter as he distracts me.
“If you can’t shoot while you’re distracted, you can’t shoot,” he says, which sounds like decent advice, but I’m pretty sure he makes it up on the spot as an excuse to keep his hands and mouth on me.
I try to focus on the weapon in my hand, and not the far more dangerous thing leaving love bites on my neck.
The sound of the gunshot echoes through the field, shattering the peaceful silence. The bottles stay standing, glinting in the light. I sigh.
“That was your fault.”
“Mhm,” Nico agrees, all too happy to take the blame if it means he gets to keep touching me. “Don’t anticipate the recoil. You’ll fuck your aim.”
The recoil isn’t what I’m anticipating.
“Nico,” I mutter when I can barely take it anymore, when I feel the wanting for him shaking in my knees, like they want to hit the ground for him here and now while I pull at the zipper of his pants and start the whole horrible cycle all over. “You’re an awful teacher.”
“I think that depends on the subject.”
I try and fail to bite back my smile. I take aim again, and this time, Nico just leans into me and watches. I miss again. I curse softly.
“It’s supposed to be hard. More precise than you’d ever need to practically be with a gun, unless you’re into rabbit hunting.”
“I could never,” I say, offended at the very idea.
“So she kills men, but not bunnies.”
“A bunny’s never deserved it,” I mutter, taking aim again. The bottle shatters into pieces.
“There you go,” he says, the same tone he uses when I’m in bed, his finger on my trigger.
With two bottles left, Nico takes his turn. He aims with one hand, the gesture familiar and sure, as if he and the gun are old friends, dance partners, sure of each other’s movements and weight. Chills run up and down my arms as I realize this was someone’s last image: Nico with his hand outstretched, chrome glistening, intent etched into the lines on his face. A deadly marksman’s stare and bottomless rage. He aims for only a moment. The second bottle shatters with a single shot.
I glare at him, offended by how simple he makes it seem. He quirks an eyebrow at his own hand, glancing at the gun as if he’s surprised, too.
“Do it again,” I order him.
There’s one bottle left standing in the sunlight.
“What? You think I got lucky?” he asks.
“I know you did.”
As Nico takes aim a second time, I step around him. I drag my hand across his back, wedge myself up against his body. I push myself up on him. My hand splays on his chest while I let the other slide down his belly, toward his groin. My fingertips skirt clumsily over his belt, his zipper.
Nico goes statue-still under my grip, the pistol in his hand waiting as his finger hesitates on the trigger.
“What’s the matter, Nico?” I ask him. “If you can’t shoot distracted, you can’t shoot.”
I drag my hand against the front of his jeans, feel the stiff rising of his cock against the seam. His eyes are staring forward, but I can see his thoughts are elsewhere, dark and churning as I grope him gently through the denim.
“The longer you wait, the worse it gets,” I whisper to him, the zipper lowering.
His teeth graze his bottom lip, a frustrated sigh rumbling in his chest.
Nico puts one hand up by my head, his thumb closing over my ear. He takes the shot—I don’t see it, but I hear the last bottle explode with a brittle snap.
Damn .
I push away from Nico, but he pulls me right back in. His mouth goes to mine, our bodies pressed close. I try to push away.
“Nico—”
“Don’t make threats you can’t make good on.”
We stand in the moment, the wind whipping at my hair, tossing strands across my eyes. Slowly, I lean up to kiss him. Our mouths meet as I deepen the kiss, spurring it on, demanding more than Nico expected. He’s trying to match my pace when I get his lower lip between my teeth and give him a soft, sharp nip.
He hisses, surprise flashing in his eyes as he reels back and scrubs his hand against the wound. A smile touches the corner of his lip as he tongues the bloodied cut.
“I missed that.”
Those words fly as sure as one of Nico’s bullets, cracking my heart into a thousand shards. I blink at him, dazed by how easily the phrase flies past my defenses.
“What?”
His voice isn’t dark and husky, isn’t laced with smug innuendo. He’s being genuine as he says, “This. This feels more like you. The girl I met in that fighting ring, who stole my car and picked fights she couldn’t win. I’m not letting her go again.”
I study the tops of our shoes, the wind whipping the words out of my mouth.
“Sometimes, you don’t have a choice,” I tell him, with a tight smile. “Or you do have a choice, and you just won’t make it.”
He lets me pull away from him, but his eyes are locked on me, magnetic and feral as I call him out. I hear his sigh as I turn my back on him.
We walk off the tension, though I still taste it in the air between us as clearly as the smoke from the shotgun.
Nico distracts us by bringing out a short-barrel rifle from the metal case. I bet a gun like that is illegal for more than just being in Nico’s possession. He puts a few shots into the dirt in front of us, showing me how it works. He talks me into shooting it just a little. The rifle stock pressed into my shoulder makes me shiver, and the frame is heavier than I expected it would be.
This time, he isn’t all over me. He stands back, and I realize he’s looking at me—taking in the whole picture. I squeeze the trigger, a spray of bullets kicking up dirt. It’s so sickeningly easy.
I could have never imagined comfortably being in a room with this weapon, much less holding it on my shoulder, my finger dancing on the trigger. No one else would have ever dragged me along to do this. It makes the sharp ringing in my ears and the pounding in my skull worth it.
“What do you think?” he asks me when I run out the clip.
“I think I’ve already shot the only man I ever intend to shoot.”
“Good news for me,” Nico gloats lowly, slipping the gun out of my hand.
“Don’t get excited. Stabbing you still isn’t off the table.”
“With what?” To my surprise, Nico flips my knife out of his pocket again. He’s kept it this whole time, carrying it around with him. “You any good with this?” he asks.
“I can peel an apple. Give it back.”
“What would you do, if I started coming at you with this?” he asks, taking slow steps toward me as he drops the gun into the grass.
“I’d probably stand here and wait for you to hand it over, since it belongs to me.”
“You never learned to shoot, you got no self-defense lessons. Marcel really plans to keep you in that house forever, doesn’t he? Like nothing could ever happen to you, just because you’re his little sister. He shouldn’t have brought you into our world if he wasn’t going to prepare you for it.”
“And that’s what you’re doing?” I ask.
“If you’re striking deals with Sal about trying to get on jobs, even the safe ones, the ones that look normal and ordinary at a glance, you have to know how to do this. One bad day, somebody else’s fuckup, that’s all it takes. It’s a life people only want when it’s going good, because when it goes bad, it goes bad all the way.”
“I don’t mind the bad,” I say.
“I know,” he says softly, “but I mind for you.”
“Show me, then. What am I supposed to do if you’re coming at me with a knife?”
Nico laughs. “You’re supposed to shoot me .”
I wrinkle my nose at the thought of carrying a gun around all the time, like the nut jobs you hear about on the news.
“All those expensive women’s self-defense courses, they don’t mean shit once you’re cornered by a man twice your weight. You know what all that advice boils down to in the end?” he asks softly, getting closer, keeping my attention like a lure. “Just enough foolish self-confidence to get yourself into a bad situation.” He’s so close now. The bad situation , front and center.
“Go on,” he says lowly. “Stop me.”
“No,” I answer.
He kisses me again, pinning me back against the fence. He props me up to sit on it, my legs around him as he gives me a little height advantage. I lean down and kiss him, running my fingers through his short hair that’s just starting to grow out. My hands run over his cheeks, angling the kiss hungrily. I finally give in, after hours and hours of pretending I can resist.
“When you went to prison,” I say as we linger in the moment, “was it really over a girl?”
I don’t know why my stomach feels tight and sick at the thought of his answer. For a long minute, Nico doesn’t say anything. Maybe I’ve finally got my fingers in his trauma, digging into the deep wound until it bleeds again.
“Yeah,” he finally admits.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“If you want to know something, you ask. I’m not careful with you. Don’t be careful with me.”
Finally, studying the tops of the trees in the distance, I admit, “Maybe I don’t want to know.”
“Jealous?”
I scoff, as if the idea is absurd.
“Just worried that I’m going to get subpoenaed at your next court case, when you murder someone else in a possessive rage.”
Nico presses our foreheads together, his words dark and warm as he utters,
“Don’t worry about that. Wives can’t testify against their husbands.”
I almost fall off the fence, barely catching myself on the wood. Little splinters dig into my palms.
“You’re not my fiancé,” I remind him.
His finger traces mine, following the curve of my empty ring finger.
“I own you more than that fucker ever will,” he whispers.
My wanting for him feels hollow between my legs, a dark, hungry need to be filled in the way only he can fill me.
I push away and hop down, breaking out of the spell like it’s a fever dream. He’s barely touched me and I’m breathless, my hands clammy. I toss Nico a beer, ordering him to chug it. I pick up the pistol again, avoiding his watchful gaze as I reload the gun.
I have the sudden urge to shoot something.